Finally!!!! The long wait is over. The latest dev channel of Google Chrome comes with the ability to sync your extension with the “cloud”.

Google Chrome build has officially added support to sync extensions along with the earlier ability to sync preferences, bookmarks and themes over the cloud, this was a highly demanded feature and will definitely add more value to the already feature rich browser.

To enable Extensions sync for Google Chrome, edit the Chrome shortcut and add the –enable-sync-extensions to the end of the file path preceded by a space as shown in the screenshot below.

This is definitely good news since now users will be able to access all their Chrome settings from anywhere. Lets hope that they add password synching too now. More info on the latest dev build for Chrome can be found here.

Flock the popular social browser which earlier ran on the Firefox Gecko engine has dumped Mozilla for Chromium, the popular new browser which also powers Google Chrome.

The new Flock beta browser now runs on Webkit which is also part of Safari and Google Chrome. Flock which has about 8 million users has also landed a new feature where you can create a Flock account and sync your settings to the "cloud".

Users can use the cloud feature to take their accounts to any Flock browser without having to reset it again and again. Considering that most of the other browsers too have an option to sync profiles or at-least bookmarks, it made more sense to have it in the newest Flock beta too. Apart from that Flock almost remains the social browser people have known it to be.

The switch from Firefox code to Chromium will come as a big jolt for Mozilla whose internet browser Firefox’s popularity has been going down since the launch of Google Chrome. Also the team at Flock had initially worked with the Mozilla team on the Netscape project before moving towards creating Flock, so their decision to branch out Flock to Chromium will be even more bitter.

You can download the latest beta of Flock by visiting this page, more info and details are available at the official Flock blog here.

Earlier last month, Google, Mozilla and Opera announced a new competitor to the H.264 codec for HTML5, WebM. Opera had already released new builds with WebM support, and today Mozilla will be officially adding WebM support to their nightly builds.

The announcement was made by Chris Pearce a Mozilla developer working on Firefox. WebM is a welcome addition to the HTML5 family since there are only 2 codecs available right now one of which is open source and other one being proprietary.

WebM on the other hand is open source and superior than the Ogg Theora codec currently in use. WebM in itself has not been out of controversies and has also come under attack from Steve Jobs who himself support the proprietary H.264 codec.

Excited about trying out WebM on Firefox? Head over and download the latest copy from the Firefox Nightly Build repository here. Once you have downloaded and installed the latest nightly you can experience WebM support by visiting a YouTube HTML5 experiment here.

For more information about the nightly build and instructions on doing your own build with WebM support visit Chris’s blog post here.

In the recent past, Apple has been vilified for acting like a big brother. Regular Techie Buzz readers are probably familiar with Apple’s battle against Flash and their stance against open technologies like Theora and WebM. Perhaps stung by the criticism, Apple has launched a new HTML5 showcase demonstrating what’s possible with Safari.

The message is loud and clear – Flash isn’t the only way to deliver rich web applications. If developers don’t want to write Apple product-specific code, they can always opt for open web standards.

The HTML5 Technology demo gallery has some spectacular samples, which showcase video, audio, typography, transitions and more. Each and every one of these demos have Apple’s hallmark. They are simple, yet stunning enough to wow you.

Unfortunately, they also bear Apple’s other signature – a lot of half-truths. According to Opera developer, Haavard K. Moen, “The only things that are HTML5 on that page are HTML5 <audio> and <video>”.

Worse still, Apple is using browser sniffing to artificially block other browsers. So, although Chrome – another WebKit based browser, does significantly better than Safari in HTML5Test.com, it stumbles while rendering Apple’s HTML5 showcase. Opera is another browser with an impressive HTML5 support that is not allowed to render Safari’s technology demos.

It is obviously well within Apple’s rights to create stunning demos showcasing its browser’s capabilities. However, dubbing its technology demos as HTML5 and Web Standards showcase, when they are clearly not, is despicable.

Apple deserves credit for encouraging and promoting HTML5. In fact, their focus on HTML5 will probably lead to an overall faster rate of adoption among both browser makers and developers. However, as Haavard points out, Apple is also trying to use HTML5 and open, as a buzzword, to its advantage.

And yeah, if you thought Microsoft fares better, here is a hilarious take on Internet Explorer’s HTML5 Testing Center.

Update: As pointed out by Sathya, Mozilla’s Robert Sayre has responded to Apple’s HTML5 Demos in his own eloquent manner.

Firefox Sync, the flagship browser syncing extension is now officially a part of the Firefox roadmap. It will be available in Firefox by default from the next major release and is available for use as an extension until then.

Firefox Sync, earlier knows as the Weave Sync has come out of the Mozilla Labs and has reached the version 1.3 now. The new version also has several changes, the major ones of those being one click access to all previously synced tabs, availability in multiple languages and a simple signup process.

However, this inclusion of Firefox Sync into Firefox imminent as the latest iPhone Home application is totally based on the Firefox Sync add-on and syncs with data fetched from it.

This is a nice feature and no wonder, it is going to attract some more users though, Firefox has once again been a follower in this race. Opera browser has a links feature which does a similar task and it has been present in Opera even before the inception of this idea for Firefox. It is time Mozilla takes us a stronghold on the innovation front and develops a never before feature. That would give people a reason to use Firefox now that it is no match for speed with other browsers.

We have earlier seen some nice tricks to reopen accidentally closed tabs in Firefox and Opera. This time it’s Google Chrome but the extension which I am going to discuss here adds much more flexibility and choice to the accidentally closed tabs.

It’s called Trashcan and the way it works is simply superb. After installing the extension, you will notice a trash icon just next to the Google Chrome address bar:

Now keep browsing as you normally do and don’t worry when you accidentally close a tab and want to reopen it. Just hit the trash icon and the extension will show you a list of the recently closed tabs, as shown below:

Clicking an entry from the list opens the URL in a new browser tab. I Agree that Google Chrome has an in built feature to open the recently closed tabs from the new tab page. But the new tab page shows you a maximum of 5 suggestions and you have to open the browsing history (Control + H) to find the complete list of closed tabs.

The Trashcan extension is much better – you get choice as well as one click access to the recently closed tabs (much like opera).

The extension is in it’s early stages of development and the developer claims to add more enhancements in the near future. This could mean saving tabs between sessions, support for multiple windows and saving closed tabs in the incognito mode as well. Thanks to DownloadSquad for the tip.

Techie Buzz Verdict

The Trashcan extension is a must if you have the habit of opening a large number of tabs. If you forget to bookmark the URL or to copy the link of a webpage, you can quickly reopen the particular tab from the Trash list.

Google Chrome extensions have brought features to the browser and coupled with the awesome speed Chrome has, this gives us an amazing overall browsing experience. I have personally switched over to Google Chrome as my default browser and am satisfied with it.

Google Chrome extensions now have an added advantage. Chrome got a nifty feature of extension notifications whereby any installed extension can send out windows style notifications. This feature was already available to websites from Chrome 4. In the latest build, this feature will be made available to extension developers by a notification API.

One of the first to use this notification is the Gmail notifier add-on for Google Chrome. This added feature into the notification API can mean two things.

The advantage of this is that extension developers are no more limited to OS capabilities to display notifications and can easily do so using the browser. This will get clearer when more extensions use this feature to create a better user experience. Facebook and Twitter apps will be the first to follow.

Though, a downside of this is how extension developers will use this to provide some real functionality or simply for creating annoying notifications.

Up until now, Firefox lovers using a 64 bit operating system were restricted to using only the builds provided by their operating systems or, the ones they could get off the Mozilla-x86-64 project at http://wiki.mozilla-x86-64.com/X64_Build. This is going to change soon.

Mozilla has started rolling out nightly builds for Firefox on Mac and Linux and will soon start doing the same for Firefox on Windows as well. The 64 bit version is already available for Mac and Linux. The Windows version will arrive soon and the final version of the next release, Firefox 4 will see releases for both x86 and x64.

This can significantly improve the global browser-share of Firefox as people on x64 still keep struggling to get a feature rich and pluggable browser. Though, just a 64-bit build of Firefox would not do the trick as most plugins like the ones for Java and flash are available only for the 32 bit system.

The build is an experimental one and has many unresolved bugs. It can cause loss of data and of you still want to try it out, download it from the Mozilla Public FTP server.

If you are using the dev version (6.0.408.1 dev) of Google Chrome, you might have come across a mighty annoying bug where Chrome crashes every time you put the PC into sleep mode and then bring it out of sleep.

This has been happening for quite a few days and has annoyed me to no end. In fact, I have started to save the Chrome session and then close the browser and then restore the session whenever I bring the PC out of sleep mode.

If you have been annoyed too, you are not alone, several users are facing this problem. I did file a bug with Chromium, however, my bug was merged with another bug since many users have reported the issue.

Though it looks like the issue will not be rectified soon, at-least not until Tuesday after the long weekend. Till then try using the session saver extension to save your session before you put the PC into sleep or switch to using the Google Chrome beta or stable releases.

64bit processors are the future of computing and most of the new PCs or laptops you buy have them. However, not many software available out there leverage the 64bit processor, one of them is the popular web browser Firefox.

However, there is some good news coming your way if you have a 64bit machine and love Firefox. According to Softpedia, in a recent platform meeting held on 25th May, Mozilla has indicated that the first 64bit builds of Firefox for Windows 7 will be available in the nightly trunk by the end of this week.

Right now a stable working version is not available. However, once it is, it will be available for downloads in the latest Trunk folder at Mozilla. Right now there are not many browsers which have 64bit version available. Microsoft has a 64bit version of IE8 pre-installed with a 64bit OS, however, Google Chrome and Opera do not have dedicated 64bit browsers as of now for the Windows platform.

We will notify you whenever the Firefox 64bit edition is available for downloads.